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      ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Will Transfer to Broadway Next Fall

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      Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe, now starring in an Off Broadway revival, will lead the Broadway production as well.A starry revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” one of musical theater’s most beloved flops, will transfer to Broadway next fall, hoping to right the show’s oxymoronic reputation once and for all.The production, now midway through a sold-out run at Off Broadway’s small-scale New York Theater Workshop in the East Village, stars Daniel Radcliffe (yes, of “Harry Potter” fame) alongside two popular musical theater performers: Jonathan Groff (a Tony nominee for “Spring Awakening” and “Hamilton”) and Lindsay Mendez (a Tony winner for “Carousel”). All three will lead the Broadway cast, according to an announcement Friday; the production’s dates and the theater at which it will be staged were not specified.“Merrily,” with a much-loved score by Stephen Sondheim and an oft-bashed book by George Furth, holds a special place in musical theater lore: The original production, in 1981, was a fiasco so storied — it closed two weeks after opening — that it spawned an excellent documentary, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.”The show depicts, in reverse chronological order, the fracturing of a three-way friendship between a composer, a playwright and a novelist who meet in their early 20s. The musical is based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.In the decades since the Broadway closing, the show has been revived and reimagined over and over and over again — Richard Linklater is now spending 20 years trying to film a version starring Ben Platt, Beanie Feldstein and Blake Jenner.This latest revival, which will be the first to reach Broadway since the original, is directed by Maria Friedman, a British actress who once starred in a “Merrily” run in England, and who has been developing her production for a decade, starting at Menier Chocolate Factory in London, followed by London’s West End (where it won the Olivier Award for best musical revival) and Huntington Theater Company in Boston.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times and a longtime “Merrily” observer, praised the revival’s current Off Broadway production, writing “it is perhaps for the first time perfectly cast,” and concluding, “Maybe, finally, it’s a hit.” In The Washington Post, the critic Peter Marks called it “intoxicating” and “revelatory.”The lead producer of the revival will be Sonia Friedman — a prolific and powerful London-based producer who is also the sister of Maria Friedman. The producing team includes Sondheim’s widower, Jeff Romley, as well as David Babani, who is the artistic director of Menier Chocolate Factory, and Patrick Catullo. More

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      With ‘Company,’ Antonio Banderas Brings Sondheim to Spain

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      Many Broadway blockbusters make their way to Madrid, but Banderas wants to push the envelope with serious, complex musicals that are little-known in Spain.On a recent Friday night, a fashionable Madrid audience leaped to its feet at the end of a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” The crowd cheered the 40 onstage actors and musicians, but the most enthusiastic ovations were reserved for Antonio Banderas, the production’s director and star. For the past nearly three hours, the Spanish actor had crooned, belted and twirled his way through the first Spanish-language production of the groundbreaking 1970 musical.Banderas’s “Company” started life a little more than a year ago in Málaga, the actor’s hometown in southern Spain, where he founded a musical theater company, Teatro del Soho, in 2019. After a stop in Barcelona earlier this year, the production is ending its run in Madrid, where it is playing through Feb. 14, 2023, at the Teatro Albéniz.“I actually am an actor because of musical theater and musical movies,” Banderas, 62, said in an interview the next day. As an adolescent in 1970s Málaga, he explained, he grew up with the great musicals of the era, including “Hair,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell.”That early love was the inspiration behind Teatro del Soho, a nonprofit that Banderas compared to the Public Theater in New York, which aims to bring musicals other than blockbuster Broadway fare to Spanish theatergoers. (The company’s most recent production is Stephen Schwartz’s “Godspell.”)Over the past two decades, Madrid has emerged as the musical theater capital of the Spanish world. Among the 14 shows running there are “Tina,” “Mamma Mia!,” “We Will Rock You” and “The Lion King” (“El Rey León”). Now Banderas is trying to push the envelope with serious, complex works that are little-known here — and “Company” has been on Banderas’s mind for a long time.In 2003, Banderas was starring in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, playing Guido, a filmmaker having a creative crisis. Banderas recalled Sondheim visiting his dressing room during the run, and drawing similarities between Guido and Bobby, the protagonist of “Company.” He also told Banderas that there was more to that show that met the eye: “I love to create plays with enigmas,” the actor recalled Sondheim saying.After the meeting, Banderas said he immersed himself in Sondheim’s catalog. “Company” in particular became something of an obsession.Banderas received the composer’s blessing to change the age of the musical’s main character, Bobby, from 35 to 50.Javier NavalWhen “Company” premiered in 1970, it looked like nothing else on Broadway: Formally daring, and laced with irony, it is often described as a “concept musical” and has little plot to speak of. Instead, Sondheim and George Furth, who wrote the book, serve up a series of loosely connected scenes about a commitment-phobic bachelor and his friends.Banderas’s main change to the book is an age switch for Bobby — the role he plays — from 35 to 50. The composer-lyricist signed off on that before his death in 2021 at age 91, Banderas said.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing?‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.Everything in his production followed from having an older Bobby, Banderas said. The show’s vignettes are like hallucinatory episodes, as Bobby sifts through memories and dreams of his youth; regrets take on a haunting dimension because of “the proximity of death,” Banderas added.“It was always very shocking to me how much everything was thoroughly focused on Bobby,” Banderas said. “Bobby is a charismatic character, but he’s also an egotistical coward.”In Banderas’s staging, Bobby sometimes sits center stage as the large cast rotates around him. Behind them, the New York City skyline looms majestically. “I created a glittering universe and he’s in the center, as the sun,” Banderas said.Banderas has cast most of the show’s other parts with local performers. “Twenty years ago, you couldn’t find this amount of actors and actresses in Spain,” for musical theater, he said. He also insisted on using the show’s original orchestration. “I have 26 musicians here, which is not profitable,” he said, but added, “I love that sound.” (For comparison, the 2021 Broadway revival of “Company” used a 14-person band.)To create a convincing Spanish-language version, Banderas turned to Roser Batalla and Ignacio García May, a duo who had previously worked together on “A Chorus Line.”“Every Sondheim is a challenge,” said Batalla, a translator and actress from Barcelona who was in a Catalan-language production of “Company” there 25 years ago. The lyrics and music are so closely bound in the show and, indeed, in all of Sondheim’s work, she added.Banderas and the actress Marta Ribera lead the cast.Javier Naval“You have to maintain not only the rhymes and syllables and the cadence of the music, but also give the information at the right point,” said Batalla, who has translated other Sondheim shows into Spanish and Catalan.She recalled meeting Sondheim in Barcelona, in 1995, at a performance of “Sweeney Todd,” which she had translated into Catalan. “He said, ‘As long as all the ideas get to the audience, I’m OK with it.’ He never asked us for the back-translation of any of the shows,” she said.“Company” holds some thorny problems for translators. Batalla pointed to “Getting Married Today,” a punishing, rapid-fire song for a hyperventilating bride — and a high point in most performances — as a particular challenge. “It’s very quick and it needs to be understood,” she said. Spanish had relatively few monosyllabic words to recreate the song’s patter, she added, but the language’s flexible syntax helped offset the difficulty.She left some culturally and geographically specific references to 1970s New York in place, Batalla said: Since American culture is so dominant, those still resonate with Spanish audiences. “We’ve been seeing movies by Woody Allen all our life long,” she said.May, a noted Spanish playwright, said the main challenge in translating the dialogue was finding a “high-class Spanish” that matched the snappy, urbane tone of the book. He weighed “every word, every verb, every nuance, so it could be as close to the English as possible,” he said.Critics here have largely been convinced: The daily newspaper El País hailed the production as “one of the best musicals ever seen in Spain.” For Banderas, the reception is a validation of his passion and commitment.“When we put together Teatro del Soho, it was to do the musicals that actually don’t get to Spain,” he said. In addition to his work there, Banderas recently teamed up with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create Amigos Para Siempre, a joint venture to license, produce and develop theatrical work for the world’s Spanish-speaking markets.Banderas called it an opportunity to “create a platform of Broadway in Spanish to the world.” “But it’s going to take time,” he added.CompanyThrough Feb. 14, 2023, at he Teatro Albéniz, in Madrid; companyelmusical.es. More

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      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Returns, the Way It Never Was

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      Maria Friedman’s rethinking of the much-loved, much-monkeyed-with 1981 Sondheim-Furth flop gets very close to coherence, and all the way to enjoyable.Many people love something about “Merrily We Roll Along” but few people love everything.It has that brilliant Stephen Sondheim score! It has that meshuga George Furth book! It’s a comedy of misbehavior, a tragedy of cynicism, a big Broadway musical, a tiny domestic drama, a timeline in search of a story that’s never found and, anyway, doesn’t make sense. Even if it did, no one is old enough/young enough to convincingly perform roles that age in reverse from 40 to 20. And if they do, they can’t sing.What no one wants is to leave the 1981 flop alone. Though too often lifeless in its many incarnations, it is also somehow deathless, rising repeatedly from the glossy grave of its beloved original cast album — remembered more fondly than the messy if emotional original production — in hopes of a transfiguration that finally makes it work.The revival that opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop, after earlier iterations at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London and the Huntington Theater Company in Boston, comes closer to meeting that goal than any of the many I’ve seen before. Maria Friedman’s staging brings the intelligence of the songs fully alive and justifies the baroque construction. Her framing snaps the picture almost fully into focus. And with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as the show’s central trio of backward-tumbling friends, it is perhaps for the first time perfectly cast.Is that enough to make it great, the way it never was?The question resonates with the material — which, being about show business, is always involved in a meta-conversation with itself. Groff plays Franklin Shepard, a hacky movie producer in 1976, trailing two wives with a third on the way, who gradually evolves (backward) into a promising theater composer in 1957. Radcliffe plays his word man, Charley Kringas, who, in a nationally televised meltdown in 1973, spectacularly splits from the oldest of his old friends. Mendez plays the third wheel, Mary Flynn, an embittered (what else?) theater critic and washed-up novelist whose fog of alcohol slowly burns away to reveal, by the final curtain, a hopeful innocent in love forever with the unavailable Frank.Groff as Franklin Shepard, who’s a hacky movie producer when the musical opens in 1976.Sara KrulwichFriedman clarifies this rangy structure from the first image, which replaces the ensemble scenes of previous productions with Frank standing completely alone in the ruins of his life. As disembodied voices sing the opening phrases of the upbeat title song we quickly understand that we will be focusing not on the triangle so much as its apex. No one else in the story, not even his besties and exes, is quite real to Frank anyway; they are props in his monodrama, and often mangled. This is going to be the story of a brilliant young man who, failing to grow up, inevitably punches down.Happily, Groff has the glamour and fury to shoulder that interpretation. No Frank I’ve seen has been so unapologetic in his solipsism, so sure he deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card to life’s every complication. And when someone crosses him, as Charley does singing “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” on that TV show, Frank is so livid, staring straight ahead as if his friend no longer exists, that you wait in terror for what will happen next. What you get, even worse, is what happens before.The laminated ironies of Furth’s timeline, lifted from a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play with the same title and a similar arc, have always seemed better integrated into Sondheim’s ingenious score than into the plot itself. The songs are structured like a musical in reverse, with reprises preceding instead of following fuller versions, and bits of accompaniment later revealing themselves as new melodies. By the time you hear “Our Time,” the exquisite hymn of hopefulness that ends the show, you will recognize that it has already been cannibalized for parts; a few of its bleached bones show up as early as the second number, “That Frank,” with much more cynical lyrics.Friedman’s staging for the first time raises the story to nearly the same level of expressiveness. The dialogue, which in most productions sounds like movie lines instead of actual speech, has been put through some sort of sanding machine that removes its polish and restores real texture. Even in the songs, phrases that can seem too perfectly crafted are now engorged with specifics that inform the actors’ delivery and thus our understanding. For “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” Radcliffe seems to have written a Bible of back story, giving wild spins to every line that help send the song into orbit.Visually too, Friedman simplifies, reinforces and focuses what we see. Soutra Gilmour’s costumes, though changing with the years, are similar enough to immediately specify everyone in the cast. (Frank is usually in a black suit, Charley in eye-jarring argyle, Mary in busy print shmattes.) And since all the action takes place within the cold unit set representing Frank’s midcentury Bel Air house (also by Gilmour) we never wonder why we’re watching a scene, even if it nominally takes place somewhere else. We’re watching it because it’s his brain.From left: Reg Rogers and Krystal Joy Brown, with Groff, Mendez and Radcliffe.Sara KrulwichBut those fixes, however successful, are also compromises. The Bel Air house, fairly hideous and mostly blank to allow for its transformations, necessitates a lot of choral furniture-handling that works against the sleekness of the material. Though the cast, especially Mendez, is vocally splendid, the original Jonathan Tunick orchestrations, vastly reduced to nine players from 19, have undergone a radical deglamorization, making it a smart if sad choice to drop most of the brilliant overture. And if dancing doesn’t really fit Friedman’s more interior approach (the limited choreography is by Tim Jackson) the general lack of Broadway pizazz leaves the show feeling deprived of half its inheritance.With the Off Broadway run (through Jan. 22) all but sold out, and commercial producers teed up for a transfer, we may yet find out what “Merrily” can be at its best. For now, it’s just at its best so far. That means some scenes work as they never have; the Act II opener, “It’s a Hit,” which often lays an egg, is for the first time hilarious, thanks in large part to Reg Rogers as Frank and Charlie’s producer. The unlikely progress through the story of Gussie Carnegie — the producer’s secretary, then wife, then star, then ex, but in reverse — suddenly seems clear and, in Krystal Joy Brown’s fetching performance, charming if not credible.Yet at the same time, some things that used to work no longer do. The supporting characters, heavily doubled, are mostly a blur. The song “Old Friends,” which at its root is about the fatal compromises that keep people together, has a case of fake giddiness. And “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” a comedy number about the Kennedy family that the three friends perform in a downtown club in 1960, lays the egg that “It’s a Hit” no longer does.Musicals are mysterious. Even the best are games of Whac-a-Mole: Fix one problem and another pops up. It’s therefore no small thing to say that in her effort to drag a half-living thing like “Merrily” to full life, Friedman is more than halfway there. Maybe, finally, it’s a hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough Jan. 22 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Eleri Ward Captures the Longing at the Heart of Sondheim’s Work

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      On her new album, the singer fuses Stephen Sondheim’s emo register with a familiar coffeehouse folk sound.The so-called “I want” song is a convention — if not a rule — of musical theater scores. From “I’ll Know” in “Guys and Dolls” to “My Shot” in “Hamilton,” these thesis statements by leading characters typically come early in a show, hitching the plot’s momentum to their ambitions or dreams.Stephen Sondheim, arguably the greatest of musical theater songwriters, didn’t write many conventional “I want” songs — one great exception being the long “I wish” prologue to “Into the Woods” — but it was not for want of wanting. The characters he wrote for had huge, often doomed desires, whether it was the impossible no-strings intimacy Bobby seeks in “Company” or the apocalyptic retribution demanded by the demonic barber Sweeney Todd, and they expressed them in accordingly expansive musical terms.Among the qualities that Eleri Ward, a preternaturally gifted young singer whose guitar-based interpretations of Sondheim lit up last year’s brilliant album “A Perfect Little Death,” and whose follow-up collection, “Keep a Tender Distance,” is being released by Ghostlight Records on Friday, captures in her performances is the vast, unquenchable longing at the heart of the master’s work. This is not the nervy, brassy Sondheim of “Getting Married Today” or “Putting It Together,” but the wounded soul who wrote “Not a Day Goes By” and “Unworthy of Your Love,” two songs that appear on the new album.Ward plumbs this deep well in a way that feels so intuitively right, it’s remarkable no one has done it before: She has fused this emo Sondheim register with a familiar coffeehouse folk sound, adding delicate fingerpicking guitar accompaniment to support her limber, expressive soprano. In her hands, it’s not hard to imagine these songs as the creation of an especially gifted — if occasionally bloody-minded — indie singer-songwriter.Ward’s new album, “Keep a Tender Distance,” will be released on Friday.-A conservatory-trained singer and musician who grew up on musical theater, as well as pop, in Chicago, Ward, 28, stumbled on this folk-Sondheim sound when she picked up a friend’s guitar and, inspired in part by Sufjan Stevens in his mellower mode, recorded a version of “Every Day a Little Death” on Instagram in 2019. Kurt Deutsch, Ghostlight’s founder and president, later discovered her version of “Johanna (Reprise)” on TikTok, and said of that moment, “There was just a balm that came over me.” He reached out to her to see if she had more like it, and soon she did.“A Perfect Little Death” was mostly “made in her closet during the pandemic,” Deutsch said. It led to a series of live shows, first at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan, then at Joe’s Pub, where she sang a duet of “Loving You” with Donna Murphy, who first sang it as Fosca in Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1994 musical, “Passion.” In an interview, Murphy raved about Ward’s “unicorn of a voice,” adding that she especially admired that “there is nothing about Eleri that is struggling for a quality; it just all feels so fluid.”Josh Groban, who was in the audience at that first Rockwood gig and who later invited Ward to open for him on a recent concert tour, noted the “wonderful line” of her voice, which he said goes against the grain not only of the spikiness of a lot of pop music vocals, but also of what he called the “staccato in Sondheim.” (Groban will find out more about that when he stars in a “Sweeney Todd” revival on Broadway next spring.) Sondheim’s music “connects the brain to the heart,” he said, but what Ward does is “find ways to smooth the songs out and bring even more heart into the performance.”Though she reads music, Ward said she arrives at her guitar and vocal arrangements by ear, spinning the cast albums to learn the songs, then “never listening to them again.” Likewise, on “Keep a Tender Distance,” the string parts by Ellis Ludwig-Leone (“The king of moody strings,” as Ward put it) were derived from her demos rather than from the original orchestrations.The resulting interpretations are somehow both spare and lush, honoring the complexity of Sondheim’s compositions without, as the album’s producer, Allen Tate, put it, “trying to outthink” the original material. Tate, who with Ludwig-Leone is a member of the Brooklyn band San Fermin, added that “what Eleri does well is take what is really speaking to her about these songs, and then try to lay that bare, as opposed to dressing them up beyond what they already are.”“Every song explores some sort of distance from what you want or what you don’t have, and it all rolls forward,” Ward said of the 14 songs on her new album.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe 14 songs on “Keep a Tender Distance” don’t constitute a cast or concept album, exactly, but there is a kind of emotional logic to their order, from the questioning opener, “Merrily We Roll Along,” to the resolute closer, “Move On.”“The whole record is moving through space in all these different ways,” Ward told me. “Every song explores some sort of distance from what you want or what you don’t have, and it all rolls forward.”Among the album’s high points is a subtly reimagined “Another Hundred People” that suggests the original’s vertiginous pace, but is more heartbroken than breakneck, and a stark, haunting take on “Marry Me a Little,” the song from “Company” that gives the album its title and may be Sondheim’s quintessential push-me-pull-you expression of unfulfilled desire.While many singers tend to lean into the song’s delusional hope that an easy-to-handle relationship might be just around the corner (“I’m ready now!”), Ward’s voice, alternating between what Murphy called the “whistle tones” of falsetto and a Fosca-like lower register, conveys crushing need more than sunny optimism.Ward, who is currently understudying two tracks in the new musical “Only Gold” at MCC Theater, and who has recorded her own original pop music, may be feeling a bit like Bobby in “Company”: pulled in many directions by contradictory impulses. The new record, she said, is infused with the sense of, “I’m far away from the thing that I want.” Of course, that might be why it sounds so very Sondheim. More

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      Josh Groban to Star in ‘Sweeney Todd’ Revival on Broadway

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      Groban, playing the title character, will be joined by Annaleigh Ashford in a production scheduled to open in March at the Lunt-Fontanne.The demon barber of Fleet Street is returning to Broadway.“Sweeney Todd,” the deliriously gruesome Stephen Sondheim-scored musical about a wronged man bent on revenge, will get a big-cast, big-orchestra, big-budget revival next spring starring Josh Groban in the title role.Groban, a pop star renowned for the timbre of his voice, will star in the title role opposite Annaleigh Ashford, a Tony-winning actor with a gift for comedy, who takes on the part of Todd’s co-conspirator, a pie shop owner named Mrs. Lovett.The “Sweeney Todd” revival, quietly under discussion for three years and encouraged by Sondheim, who died in November, has been one of the worst-kept secrets on Broadway — speculated about for months on chat boards, and detailed last month in the email newsletter Broadway Journal.On Tuesday, the production made it official: The revival will begin previews Feb. 26 and open March 26 at the 1,500-seat Lunt-Fontanne Theater.“This show is full of such great scary fun,” Groban said in an interview. “It is Grand Guignol, it is penny dreadful.”“There is obviously a plot here that is absurd and monstrous,” he added, “but then there is also an incredible back story to this character that makes the role even more terrifying, because for all intents and purposes this was a civilized, good man that was driven to this.”Groban, who has long loved the musical’s score — he named his dog Sweeney — said he believed the role fit his strengths. “I was not ever a song-and-dance man, so for me to have roles that were cerebral and were gritty and interesting — and baritone — these were roles I felt I could really sink my teeth into,” he said. “We all have these roles that we think to ourselves, ‘If this were ever to happen, I would give it everything that I’ve got,’ and this is certainly one of those roles for me.”Annaleigh Ashford with Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2017 Broadway production of “Sunday in the Park with George.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAshford, who starred in the Sondheim musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” said she had wanted to play Mrs. Lovett since she was in her early teens, “before it was appropriate for me.”“This role is one of the finest ladies of the American musical theater canon,” she said. “She does a terrible thing, and she is a monster, but I’ve always seen her as a woman who is trying to find love and trying to be loved.”The production has an all-star team. It will be directed by Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” and produced by Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton.” The choreographer is Steven Hoggett, an acclaimed British movement director, and the set designer, Mimi Lien, is not only a Tony winner but also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.This will be Groban’s second star turn on Broadway — in 2016 he led the cast of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” winning strong reviews and a Tony nomination. Ashford has a longer Broadway track record; she has appeared in seven Broadway shows, winning a Tony in 2015 for “You Can’t Take It With You” after scoring her first nomination in 2013 for “Kinky Boots.”The revival of “Sweeney Todd,” which has a book by Hugh Wheeler, comes at a time of intensified interest in Sondheim’s work. A new production of “Into the Woods” has been among the best-selling shows on Broadway this summer, and an upcoming Off Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with a cast led by Daniel Radcliffe, is likely to be a tough ticket, given that the New York Theater Workshop, where it is being staged, has only 199 seats.Sondheim and Groban had developed a friendly relationship in the years before the composer’s death — Groban periodically performed Sondheim’s songs in concert, and Sondheim reached out when “The Great Comet” began its run. Sondheim died just three days before the revival’s first workshop began; he had been planning to attend a read-through on the workshop’s final day.The original production of “Sweeney Todd” opened on Broadway in 1979 and won eight Tony Awards, including one for best musical. It has been revived twice on Broadway and staged widely elsewhere; in 2007 it was adapted into a Hollywood film directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.Jeremy Secomb, left, as Sweeney Todd, and Siobhan McCarthy as Mrs. Lovett, in a 2017 revival at the Barrow Street Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe last two major New York productions were both small scale and intense — there was the 2005 Broadway revival, in which the actors also served as musicians (Patti LuPone, as Mrs. Lovett, played the tuba), and there was an immersive Off Broadway production in 2017 at which a former White House pastry chef served pies.The new revival veers in the other direction: big. It will have a cast of 26, and an orchestra of 27, Seller said, with a budget of about $14 million. Kail, who is friendly with Groban and put the production together after learning of his interest in the role, said that the revival would remain set in the 19th century, and that its size would offer “the opportunity to really embrace the scale and the scope” and to “let it live in that fullness.”“We’re really excited to make something that is able to touch all of those things that ‘Sweeney’ can do,” Kail said. “It can thrill you, it can make you laugh, and there’s also epiphany.” More

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      ‘A Little Night Music’ Review: A Rueful Take at Barrington Stage

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      Barrington Stage Company offers a take on the Sondheim-Wheeler classic highlighted by performances in shades of regret.PITTSFIELD, Mass. — I thought I’d seen everything you could do with “A Little Night Music,” the nearly unimprovable 1973 musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. But Barrington Stage Company’s bittersweet revival, which opened here on Wednesday, ends the first act with an especially deft touch. As the principals step forward for the final chorus of “A Weekend in the Country,” envisioning their upcoming visit to a grand estate, each carries a revealing and slightly absurd item of personal luggage.Count Carl-Magnus Malcom, a military peacock, has a gigantic hunting bow slung over his shoulder, the better to stalk game or romantic rivals. Anne Egerman, an 18-year-old virgin married to Fredrik, a stuffy middle-aged widower, totes a bird cage. (She’s the canary.) Fredrik’s son, Henrik, struggling to reconcile his seminary ethics with his hots for his stepmom, clutches a prayer book. And Fredrik himself, perhaps not realizing he’s bringing skoals to Newcastle, bears a neatly wrapped and ribboned bottle of champagne.“A Little Night Music” is like that champagne; when the original Broadway production opened, Clive Barnes, in The Times, called it Dom Pérignon. Bubbly it certainly is, especially Wheeler’s ingenious book, based on the 1955 Ingmar Bergman movie “Smiles of a Summer Night.” Henrik loves Anne; Anne won’t sleep with Fredrik; Fredrik longs for the actress Desiree Armfeldt; Desiree is kept by the jealous count; the count’s wife, Charlotte, is desperate for his attention — round it goes.And even though the stage is set for what could be a tragedy (guns do come out), when they all meet for that weekend at the manse of Desiree’s mother, it ends as happily as a Shakespeare comedy — on the surface. The mismatched and damaged souls get repaired, in both senses of the word.Despite that effervescence, though, “A Little Night Music,” in any half decent production, is also about rue. That’s even more salient in this first year following the death of Sondheim, who layered its brilliant songs so densely with varieties of regret. We feel that regret doubly now; for the characters no less than for us, pleasure is always coupled with loss.So perhaps it’s no surprise that this Barrington Stage production, directed by Julianne Boyd, gets the rue so right. Especially in the performances of three of its central women, mixed emotion is always palpable. As the embittered Charlotte, Sierra Boggess offers a sad and hilarious sketch of a wife so steeped in the brine of her own disappointment that she actually looks pickled. And Madame Armfeldt, Desiree’s imperious mother, is no senile narcissist in Mary Beth Peil’s vivid performance; she’s a woman clinging as hard as she can, in her final days, to the thrill of a fully lived past.But it’s Emily Skinner as Desiree, the focus of the complex romantic geometry, who most powerfully holds the show’s opposing forces in equilibrium and produces its warmest glow. She’s funny, of course; the scene in which she welcomes Fredrik (Jason Danieley) to her apartment after a performance and, despite his paeans to Anne, consents to revive their long-ago liaison — “What are old friends for?” — is a model of perfectly played situational humor.Later, though, the humor deepens. Near the end of the weekend, when Desiree realizes that her last-ditch dream of getting Fredrik back for good has failed, Skinner offers a reading of the show’s big hit, “Send in the Clowns,” that, aside from being wonderfully sung, is as layered as a lasagna. Beneath her good-sport bravado is anger — at Fredrik, to be sure, for still being “in midair” when she’s “at last on the ground.” But beneath that is something unexpected and even richer: anger at herself for having failed to care in time about the squalid carelessness of a tossed-off, footloose life.Vocally, the production is exceptional, with Danieley a standout among singers including Cooper Grodin as the count, Sabina Collazo as Anne and Sophie Mings as Anne’s randy maid Petra. (She scores big with “The Miller’s Son” — a showstopper but, given to a minor character, perhaps the work’s one misstep.) Every word sung is perfectly clear (the sound is by Leon Rothenberg), and the ensemble moments are gorgeous, almost overwhelming in the relatively intimate theater.Still, on opening night, there was much that needed fine-tuning. Lighting cues went awry, scene changes were erratically paced, wet clothes didn’t drip and a shattered glass produced no sound. More substantially, the men were not yet digging as deep as the women. Danieley’s Fredrik, not stiff enough at the start, has little to unravel as the evening’s profound events bear down. And Noah Wolfe’s Henrik is so floridly agonized that it’s hard to see how his profoundness may yet be appealing.A weekend in the country, with, from left, Sierra Boggess, Cooper Grodin, Jason Danieley, Sabina Collazo, Noah Wolfe and Sophie Mings. Daniel RaderSuch problems will most likely take care of themselves before the show closes on Aug. 28. There’s nothing to be done, though, about the weak-tea watercolor set by Yoon Bae and the odd costumes by Sara Jean Tosetti. (For “Send in the Clowns,” Skinner wears a gold brocade gown with lamé sleeves that looks more like a 1970s Vegas castoff than Sweden in 1900.) And though the reduction of Jonathan Tunick’s original sumptuous orchestrations to a string quartet, two keyboards and one overtaxed reed player is sufficient to support the show’s more intimate moments, the high-spirited ones lack their Straussian oomph.These are among the costs of putting on a very ambitious show at a regional theater without big Broadway money behind it. In that sense, they may be not just the costs but also the glory. It is, after all, no small thing to be able to see such worthy productions — and I’ve seen many here over the years — in a ragged, deindustrialized city like this one. It’s crucial to the culture that complex work be performed creditably at every level, and crucial to the local economy too. Barrington Stage appears to be one of Pittsfield’s most successful concerns.For that, you have to thank Boyd, who along with Susan Sperber established the company in 1995 and will retire as its artistic director at the end of this season. (Alan Paul takes over in October.) Having directed “A Little Night Music” once before, in 1998, when the company performed in the auditorium of a high school arts center in nearby Sheffield, she knows all about its mixed emotions: how the promise of growth and the acceptance of limitation are often the same thing. That’s the gift she brings to the stage at the end of Act I — just as she has brought it, for 28 seasons, to us in audience.A Little Night MusicThrough Aug. 28 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Into the Woods’ Review: Do You Believe in Magic?

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      The Encores! revival of this fairy-tale musical, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, arrives on Broadway with its humor, wonder and humanity intact.After the woods and the wolf and the dark and the knife, Little Red Riding Hood has learned a thing or two. In the first act of “Into the Woods,” while modeling a cloak made from the wolf’s pelt, she shares her wisdom. Be prepared, she advises in “I Know Things Now.” Watch out for strangers. Stephen Sondheim’s bone-dry lyrics supply one more maxim: “Nice,” Little Red concludes, “is different than good.”True. But isn’t it splendid when a work of musical theater is absolutely both?Lear deBessonet’s superb production of the Sondheim and James Lapine modern classic “Into the Woods,” which originated at Encores! in May, has made the journey west and south to Broadway. Despite some cast changes, its humor, wonder and humanity have arrived intact. Indeed, they may glimmer even more brightly at the St. James Theater than they did at City Center. So if you saw that recent staging, should you go into the woods again? Unless your budget doesn’t run to Broadway prices, of course you should. To put it another way: Wishes come true, not free.A pastiche of a half-dozen Perrault and Brothers Grimm fairy tales, “Into the Woods” debuted at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego in 1986 and on Broadway the following year. It had a respectful Broadway revival, directed by Lapine, in 2002, and a misbegotten stint at Shakespeare in the Park in 2012. Disney adapted it into a pretty, somewhat empty live action film in 2014. For decades it has remained a favorite among high school drama clubs though many of those clubs stage only the first act, when happily ever after seems possible.As Sondheim and Lapine knew, a happy ending depends on where you stop the story. Turn enough pages and death puts in an appearance, disillusion, too. Perhaps this seems like a grim lesson from a show with Cinderella (Phillipa Soo), Jack the Giant Killer (Cole Thompson) and Little Red Riding Hood (Julia Lester) among its central characters. But if you reread those original tales, they skew pretty dark. Of Sondheim’s work, only “Sweeney Todd” has a comparable body count. Yet somehow its tone is hopeful.The cast of “Into the Woods,” includes, from left: Kennedy Kanagawa (with Milky White), Cole Thompson, Brian d’Arcy James, Joshua Henry, Patina Miller, Phillipa Soo, David Patrick Kelly, Sara Bareilles and Lester.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA work of giddy playfulness and moral seriousness, “Into the Woods” forges a path from innocence into experience. It asks its characters (the surviving ones, anyway) to exchange the narcissism of childhood — the wishing, the wanting — for a more nuanced ethical framework that emphasizes interdependence. This is the message of the show’s heartbreaker ballad, “No One Is Alone,” which Sondheim articulated even more directly in a 1991 PBS interview. “We are all responsible for each other,” he said.The mood at the St. James on a recent evening did not, however, suggest deep moral inquiry. And judging by the hats worn indoors, the masks not worn at all and at least one surreptitious phone camera, everyone was handling responsibility a little differently. So what were the vibes? Pleasure, anticipation, celebration. When the lights came up, the crowd screamed and screamed and screamed. I expected panties — or given the source material, the occasional dancing slipper — to be thrown at the stage.DeBessonet’s staging, refined but little altered from the Encores! outing, uses only a wide set of stairs and a downstage strip in front of them. The set, designed by David Rockwell, with storybook lighting by Tyler Micoleau, sketches a forest in the simplest terms — descending birch trunks, a rising moon. Behind the actors, sit the musicians, conducted by the invaluable Rob Berman. If your eye should stray from the actors — a big if — you can watch them implement the chiming score, magic made visible.If the production’s style is minimal, it is never austere and on this mostly blank canvas, deBessonet, aided by Lorin Latarro’s playful choreography, paints in rich and plentiful tones. Kindness is a watchword of deBessonet’s work, as seen in her many Public Works productions. A recognition of shared humanity, too. Here it seems to extend everywhere, to actors and audience both. I have rarely seen a show in which the cast had this much fun. In the case of Gavin Creel, who went up on the second verse of “Any Moment” and covered — sort of — by kissing his co-star Sara Bareilles, arguably too much fun. Throughout there is a feeling of largess that only occasionally shades into indulgence. And honestly, some of that indulgence (as in “Agony,” sung to pieces by Creel and his co-prince, Joshua Henry) is a joy, too.Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife and James as the Baker. “Together they find some fine rhythms in the roles of a married couple only beginning to know each other,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBareilles’s performance as the Baker’s Wife has only grown, beanstalk-like, since the Encores! production. Best known as a singer-songwriter and the composer of “Waitress,” she has more recently established herself as a comic actor on “Girls5Eva.” Here, her comedy has both broadened and deepened. While she and Neil Patrick Harris had a wild, nervy chemistry at Encores!, she is now partnered by the mellower Brian d’Arcy James. Together they find some fine rhythms in the roles of a married couple only beginning to know each other.Soo, a shimmering soprano who can make each emotion as legible as skywriting, gracefully replaces Denée Benton. (Benton replaced her in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” when it moved to Broadway; fair’s fair.) And Patina Miller, replacing Heather Headley, renders the Witch with a fierce, dangerous glamour, trading Headley’s initial restraint for more ardent shadings. On this recent evening, the puppeteer Kennedy Kanagawa was out sick, but his understudy, Cameron Johnson, was an able herdsman for Jack’s pal, Milky White. That cow still kills. And the children’s chorus is gone. Thank God.During the second act, I worried — though worry is too strong a word — that maybe this production had become too funny, too lightsome. The devastations of the second act didn’t flatten me the way they had two months ago. But really, who wants flattening right now? Instead this show values resilience, connection.At the end, once Soo had trilled the final ambivalent syllables, the audience leaped to its collective feet. The actors bowed and curtsied and smiled. The rest of us clapped and clapped.No one was alone.Into the WoodsThrough Aug. 21 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan; intothewoodsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      She’ll Have You at Moo: Milky White and the Power of Puppetry

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      Once upon a time on Broadway, back in 1987, the skinny old “cow as white as milk” in the new James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods” was played by a prop as still as a statue. The cow, Milky White, has no lines, so it worked.Years went by, the fairy-tale mash-up musical returned to Broadway in 2002, and this time Milky White was played by an actor in a cow suit. Now she could dance, and that worked, too.Decades passed, and in the frenzied spring of 2022 came a hit Encores! revival so delicious that it transferred almost instantly from New York City Center to Broadway. Now in previews at the St. James Theater, where it opens on July 10, this “Into the Woods” presents Milky White as a puppet who breathes, coughs, moos and mourns — which works enchantingly.Or as an enchantment? It is a mysterious thing, the preternatural dynamic between a puppet onstage and the people in the seats, even the grown-up ones.”We’re best friends,” the actor Kennedy Kanagawa said of the cow puppet that he brings to life in “Into the Woods.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWe, the savvy spectators, know that the puppet isn’t what it pretends to be. We can plainly see, for example, that Milky White is not an actual cow, that her scrawny ribs are built of cardboard, that an agile actor — the Broadway newcomer Kennedy Kanagawa — is operating her. But we look right past the artifice and invest in the puppet. Whereupon it unlocks in us a less guarded, more primal sympathy than we might allow ourselves to feel for a human performer.“There is a funny sort of yes-and that has to take place,” said James Ortiz, the Obie Award winner (for the puppet-filled Tin Man prequel “The Woodsman”) who designed Milky White. “There’s a magical sort of agreement that automatically happens. I really can’t explain fully why, but an audience just leans in and goes, ‘It’s real.’”In the musical, Milky White is the cow traded by Jack — the not-so-bright boy of beanstalk fame — for a pittance of five magic beans. With floppy ears, a free-swinging udder and a head of soft foam textured with paper, she has a handmade aesthetic that’s ideal for Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director, who confessed to having “almost an inverse emotional relationship” to slickly engineered production elements.For her, high-tech means low emotion. Whereas with Milky White, deBessonet melted as soon as she saw her move — though that initial glimpse was digital, in a short video that Ortiz shot after he first built Milky White.Kanagawa, Milky White and Cole Thompson during a rehearsal of “Into the Woods” at New 42nd Studios.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“He conceived a cow that has a full range of ecstasy and sadness and embarrassment and longing and all of these things,” said deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, who is making her Broadway debut with this production. “He knows how to leave just that right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning and play.”As high-profile Sondheim revivals tend to be, deBessonet’s is packed with stars: Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince.Milky White is the principal puppet, but Ortiz has designed her some puppet company: a gargantuan and sinister pair of witch’s hands; the Giant’s elegant, open-weave boots (for which Ortiz tapped the wicker expertise of a fellow puppet designer, Camille Labarre); and, as Cinderella’s loyal friends, a flock of normal-size birds. Their wings have fragments of text on them, even though Ortiz knows the detail is too tiny for the audience to see.“The feathers are made out of torn-up pieces of poetry,” he said. “There’s also bits of Shakespeare in there from ‘Twelfth Night,’ because it’s about a young girl who disguises herself and finds love.”Early one evening in June, after the first rehearsal for the Broadway run, Ortiz and Kanagawa were sitting in a rehearsal studio on West 42nd Street, giving an interview for this article. A few feet away Milky White hung next to the birds on a metal rack, looking as lifeless as any puppet does without its puppeteer.Phillipa Soo, right, as Cinderella and Albert Guerzon, rehearsing a scene in which he operates a flock of birds, Cinderella’s loyal friends.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesKanagawa walked over and, after checking with Ortiz to make sure it was OK, took her down. Holding her by the handles, Kanagawa played with her spindly, splaying cardboard legs and recounted how he learned to shift her udder to one side when she needs to sit down. But he wasn’t puppeteering her just yet; she was still inanimate.Then he tilted her head ever so slightly, and instantly there she was: imbued with life and seemingly quizzical — even if her big, almost teary eyes are really just beveled foam coated with clear epoxy that catches the light.“Yeah, we’re best friends,” said Kanagawa, who was praised for his expert puppeteering in Alexis Soloski’s review of the Encores! production in The New York Times.It’s a recent skill for Kanagawa. Ortiz asked him to play Milky White because of his playfulness and imagination as an actor and his deep-rooted passion for the show. Then he taught him how to do it.This production has offered both of them the space to evolve the musical’s performance tradition, considering the sparsely written Milky White as a full character in puppet form.“We just kind of talk endlessly about cow logic,” Ortiz said.“Which honestly is kind of dog logic,” Kanagawa said. “Milky is a pet.”There’s the “right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning,” said Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOrtiz, 38, grew up in Dallas, and made his Broadway debut this spring, designing the frolicsome mammoth and dinosaur puppets for “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and, the season being what it was, filling in for three performances as that show’s head puppeteer. The first live musical he ever saw was a high school production of “Into the Woods,” with a statue-style cow.Kanagawa, 37, was born in Tokyo and moved to the Washington, D.C., area when he was 10. In seventh grade, at a birthday party, he watched the video recording of “Into the Woods” with its original Broadway cast and original Broadway cow — then got his own VHS copy and, he said, “absolutely destroyed it with watching it so many times.”More recently, in Rob Marshall’s 2014 movie version (with James Corden as the Baker, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s Wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Meryl Streep as the Witch), a genuine cow played the cow — not a casting decision likely to be emulated by many stage productions.Long before that, though, an idea percolated in Hollywood that might have permanently altered the performance tradition of “Into the Woods.” The Muppets creator Jim Henson was interested in making a film adaptation. He “saw the show and was a fan,” Lapine wrote in an email. “He was a wonderful fellow.” But Henson died in 1990.Five years later, the idea moved forward anyway at Columbia Pictures. As Sondheim recalls in his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” the animals in the movie were to be played by “Henson creatures.” The script got a couple of readings with a couple of deliriously starry casts (one had Robin Williams as the Baker, Cher as the Witch and Carrie Fisher and Bebe Neuwirth as Cinderella’s stepsisters) before, Sondheim writes, the project was killed in a studio shake-up.It’s easy to envision a profusion of puppet Milky Whites, a whole generation’s worth, blossoming forth onstage if that film had happened. Instead, the cow that deBessonet asked for, and Ortiz designed, and Kanagawa operates, will be Broadway’s first puppet Milky White.Just lean in and look into her eyes. There’s no question at all: She’s real. More